A Morning for Flamingos Quotes

“And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it's hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“This started out as a story about my own fear, or rather about a time in my life when, because of an injury, I was not sure who I was, when I had to wait each night for a protean figure of my own creation to define me as something weak and loathsome and undeserving of breath. Instead, it became a story of others, people I discovered to be far more brave in their way than I am. And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it’s hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“I’ve grown old enough to put away vain and foolish concerns about mortality, and to stop imposing the false measures of calendars and clocks upon my life, or, for that matter, upon eternity.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“You know, I think you have another potential. Maybe in scholarship. Like reducing the encyclopedia to a simple declarative sentence.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“I had grown weary of federal agents and wiseguys, narcs and stings and brain-fried lowlifes, and all the seriousness and pretense we invest in the province of moral invalids.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“So that’s how to the dark tower I came.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“I could feel myself slipping inside that dark alcoholic envelope of depression and regret that for long periods had been characteristic of my adult life.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“it can reach a murderous intensity within minutes over a betrayed trust, a lie, a wrong against a family member.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“I don’t try to correct yesterday’s mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“Pretty damn boring to be a spectator in your own life.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos

“We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That’s what makes it so painful, kiddo.”
― James Lee Burke, A Morning for Flamingos